One of the most competitive cohorts to apply to top business schools from is the investment banking pool. That being said, business schools do like investment bankers because they’re usually smart, aggressive, ambitious, and on a good career trajectory. Most graduated from brand name colleges and did very well academically. The key for investment bankers to be successful with their MBA applications is to describe a compelling (and substantiated) career vision, to have solid reasons for why you want an MBA, and to focus on letting your character and leadership potential shine through.
Investment bankers tend to make a lot of silly mistakes with their MBA applications. One of the reasons for this is that their egos have been juiced for one or two years by the time they begin applying to MBA programs. What do I mean by this? Junior investment bankers like to think of themselves as hot shit, going on road shows, working with management teams, making more money than they ever imagined they would at 22. They think they’re better than anyone else (by virtue of what they do, what firms they work at, and how much they make). What happens to investment banking applicants is that their self-righteous attitudes tend to steer them to overvalue the importance of their work, the prestige of the industry they’re working in, and the brand value of the firms they work at, and as a result don’t realize that they should really be focused on emphasizing personal qualities, leadership potential, and developing a compelling, substantiated, and consistent story. Too often do investment banking Analysts and Associates dwell too long on deals they worked on or how great their firm, industry group, or product group is. Too often do investment bankers not realize that admissions officers don’t really care about specific deals, the dollar size of deals, or that your firm ranked number one in some league table. That’s right. They don’t care if you worked on the biggest deal ever completed in the utilities industry. These things reveal nothing about you as a person or a potential future leader. The application is there for you to sell yourself, not your job or your firm.
What admissions committees do care about is how you used your leadership abilities to resolve team conflicts, to influence people senior to you, to start new firm-wide recruiting initiatives, etc. If you were instrumental in helping get a deal done, don’t spend time throwing out big numbers and explaining all the complicated analysis that was involved. Rather, talk about how you were effective in getting X, Y, and Z things done. Talk about all the soft things you did that helped you motivate people or convince people to take your side. Talk about a time you made a difficult ethical decision or a time you elevated an ethical problem to senior management. These are the types of interesting stories admissions committees care to hear about in your MBA applications.
Investment banking Analysts no longer need an MBA to get promoted to Associate anymore. As such, investment banking applicants need to be particularly focused on explaining what their career vision is and how an MBA can help them achieve that vision. If you let the admissions committee sense that you are applying for the wrong reasons (e.g. because it’s the natural thing to do after a two-year stint in investment banking, because you have no clue what you want to do next, or that you hate your current life and just want out), you might as well throw away your MBA applications.